What's Wrong with the Socialist Party?
Author: Allan L. Benson (1871-1940)
Keywords: Socialism -- United States; Marxism -- United States; Social Democracy -- United States; Anarchism -- United States; socialism; socialist; Marxism; communism; anarchism; anarchist; Socialist Party of America; SPA; Social Democratic League of America; SDL
Collection: opensource
Description
What's Wrong with the Socialist Party?
by Allan L. Benson
First published in The New Appeal, whole no. 1,176 (June 15, 1918), pg. 1.
The Joseph Lieberman of the Socialist Party, former 1916 SPA Presidential nominee-turned-bitter party critic Allan Benson, breaks a year of silence to unleash his guns on his former political organization in the pages of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius's The New Appeal. Benson recycles the archaic verbiage of the 1880s, characterizing the direct action-oriented Left Wing of the Socialist Party as "anarchists" and blaming all the party's recent ills on the "sabotage" conducted by those whom the SP Right and Center banned in 1912.
Benson is sharply critical of the ideas that "workers have no country" and that "workingmen should not be concerned with the outcome of any war except the class war," bolstering his opinion with the example of Karl Marx's staunch support for the cause of the Union in the American Civil War. Benson contends that for the Socialist Party to be respected in a world increasingly turning to socialist ideas, "the party must be respectable." Since the 1917 Emergency National Convention it has been no such thing, in Benson's view -- a situation for which he blames "anarchists, falsely regarded as Socialists" who are "aided and abetted by certain foreigners whose naturalization papers should be cancelled while they themselves are deported to the countries from which they came."
Published in the USA prior to 1923, public domain.
Edited and footnotes by Tim Davenport. Published by 1000 Flowers, Corvallis, OR, June 2012.
Uploaded to Archive.org by Tim Davenport on June 19, 2012.
Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0
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| Mediatype: | texts |
| Licenseurl: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ |
| Identifier: | WhatsWrongWithTheSocialistParty |
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| Identifier-ark: | ark:/13960/t79s2x481 |
| Ppi: | 300 |
| Ocr: | ABBYY FineReader 8.0 |
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